


A Long Time

by elle_stone



Series: Halloween Fright Fest 2018 [3]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Banshees, F/M, Gen, Halloween, Minor Character Death, Past Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-29
Updated: 2018-10-29
Packaged: 2019-08-09 17:29:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,913
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16454261
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elle_stone/pseuds/elle_stone
Summary: Because the woman looks so much like his sister, he is not afraid, and he takes a few steps forward without thinking. She doesn't look up. But he can see now that she's crying: her shoulders are shaking, and he can hear, just barely, her quiet, breathless sobs breaking the silence.Years after Lincoln's death, Octavia, or someone like her, returns home.





	A Long Time

Bellamy sees her for the first time in the evening, beneath a colorless sky, by the light of a fading sun that is bound, the others tell him, to play tricks. He's standing out by the end of the old wall, wondering when they'll get the chance to take the rest of it down. Probably not until after winter, because they need to focus now on the harvest and on fortifying their new homes for the cold months ahead. Still, he will be glad to see the last of it go. He fears that they will push the work off and off, and the wall will stay, and its old parts will rust together, and it will sink into the earth, always there like a monument to their old fear and their old rage and their grief. 

He takes one last deep breath of the sharp harvest air and prepares to head back to the ship, back inside. It's almost dinner and his family is waiting for him. That's how he's come to think of them, not his people anymore but his— 

He raises his head just before he turns around and that's when he notices her: a thin, pale woman with long, dark hair, sitting on a rock out past the old wall, her head bowed and her face in her hands. His first thought is that she looks like Octavia. His second is that that is impossible, and his third: maybe she's come home. 

Bellamy has seen people, presumed dead, rise from their hiding places and return. He's seen it plenty of times. He discounts nothing in this strange world anymore. 

Because the woman looks so much like his sister, he is not afraid, and he takes a few steps forward without thinking. She doesn't look up. But he can see now that she's crying: her shoulders are shaking, and he can hear, just barely, her quiet, breathless sobs breaking the silence. Arkadia has built its new houses on the far side of the old station, where the first parts of the wall were pulled down, where there's room. This section is mostly old storage structures and the edge of the forest. No one's out here at this hour and the woman's cries sound all the more mournful against this backdrop of isolation and creeping decay. 

Bellamy is close enough now to consider calling out to her, and to wonder why she has not seemed to notice, yet, his approach. He wants to call her by her name. He wants to ask, _O?_ and he wants her to look up and to show him her face again. But before he can open his mouth, she drops her hands from her face, tilts her head back and lets out a chilling, painful, anguished wail.  

He startles and freezes immediately in his tracks. 

The sound is ragged and miserable, almost impossible to listen to and yet it goes on and on: a hostile, raging howl of grief and misery and rage. Bellamy closes his eyes. He cannot think through the ringing, wretched shriek, can barely even breathe. He does not know what is happening or what to do. 

When the grief-sound finally quiets, he hesitates to open his eyes. The woman has grown still, and bowed her head again. Her hands are in her lap, no longer covering her face, so he can make out her features for the first time: the otherworldly pale glow of her skin, her eyes dark and deep-set in the hollows of her skull. As he watches, she takes a deep breath, as if she might wail and moan again, but instead she looks up, slowly, and fixes her cold, black bitter eyes on him. He recognizes her now. He recognizes that he was right from the beginning, and that he was wrong. The woman wears Octavia's face, but she is not Octavia.  

Not anymore. 

* 

After Lincoln's death, she was never the same.  

That is easy to say, of course, because loss always transforms. But not always this way. At the time, they thought she was grieving, and that the grief, at least the worst of it, would pass. 

It didn't. It calcified, it wore itself into the lines of her face, it weighed down her limbs. Some days she'd talk only to Bellamy, some days only to Jasper, who tried to tell her that he understood, who would fight with her sometimes in the shadow of the old wall, on the days when they dragged each other down—some days she spoke to no one at all. 

She stayed with them one more winter, and then she packed her bag and left.  

They heard rumors she'd joined one of the distant Grounder clans and taken up farming. Returning herself to the Earth, Bellamy thought, as he tilled the ground. And he understood. Giving herself distance from painful memories, he thought, when he put the Rover into drive and headed out on patrol. He felt that urge, too. Giving herself time, he reminded himself, sometimes at night, as he listened to Clarke breathing peacefully at his side. Sometimes that is necessary too. 

He waited for her to come back. Or for more rumors to reach him. A few did, but only every now and again. Then none at all.  

Years passed, and they began to talk of building anew. The first panels of the wall came down. 

* 

He brings up Octavia at dinner, and the name feels strange on his lips; he has not spoken it aloud in a long time. No one answers at first. They do not seem to know what to say or even where to look: they turn to Bellamy first, then to each other, quick glances and then away. 

Finally, Jasper, into the uncertain silence: "I think if we were going to hear any more from her, we would have. By now." He shrugs his shoulders up toward his ears but is brave enough to look Bellamy in the eye. "I don't think," he adds, slowly. The words falter and he has to start again. “I don't think she's alive anymore." 

"You have no reason to think she's dead," Monty says, quick on top of Jasper's words and too loud, not wanting to let them settle in their quiet, sorrowful way—but Bellamy holds up his hand and shakes his head, because he does not want to be defended, he does not want to argue this. 

He thinks that Jasper is right. But he won't say it, just in case one of the others should see her someday, too. Then he'd have to explain. He does not want to have to explain. 

Monty bites his tongue, and Bellamy lets his hands settle, starts picking at the last of his food, now grown cold on his plate. 

"Sometimes people do come home," Clarke reminds him gently, and bumps her arm against his arm to comfort him. He looks up, and sees that the others, Miller and Raven and even Murphy, are nodding their agreement, a little Greek chorus of sympathy, and then he understands. He sees what is happening. They think that he's mourning. They think that this lost and distant expression on his face is grief. 

They're half-right. He's thinking about her. And he is sorrowful, he is grieving.  

He's also fearful. He cannot rid the memory of her face from his mind. 

* 

The temperature drops and the harvest ends; they start waking up to frost on the ground. Bellamy starts to worry, as he always does, about their stores of winter food. Clarke, for her part, worries about illness and disease, and not without reason, because when the first, early snow falls, a fever sweeps its way through the village, and lays low half their population with hallucinations and chills. 

The healthy take care of the sick, the illness spreads. The sick recover and tend to their caretakers. Most people return to full health within a week, sometimes two.  

Peter Colton just gets sicker and sicker. Bellamy stays by his side through the night and helps him remember their first Earth days, the Dropship days, the good days, helps him sort out the delusions from the memories, helps remind him that the figures in the corners of the room aren't real. 

Peter dies early in the morning, just past sunrise. Only his father and Bellamy are awake to say goodbye, though if he understood their presence at the end, Bellamy will never know. After, Bellamy gets up and walks outside. He stands just outside the infirmary and watches the way the clear morning light hits the new cabins, illuminating the careful beauty of their work. 

Octavia is standing by the woodshed, watching him, her hair and clothes a void of black against the thin layer of new snow on the ground. Bits of dirt show through the low drifts. She doesn't make any noise this time, but she's been crying. Bellamy can see the tear tracks on her skin. He doesn't say anything either, and when he's ready, he walks home across the cracking, crisp thin snow. 

* 

That evening, Clarke finds him pacing by the woodshed, and he hears himself telling her everything.  

She stands close at his side with her arm linked through his arm, looking up at him, watching him as he tries to explain. He starts and stops often, and she waits, gentle and steady. 

"I know it sounds like something I'm imagining," he says. "But it's not. I really saw her." He glances down at Clarke and tries, in a small, weak way, to smile. "This isn't a fever talking, I swear." 

"Oh, I know," she answers, and reaches up for a moment to test his forehead with the back of her hand. "I'd know if you had a fever." 

"So you believe me?" 

She nods. "I do." Then she tilts her head, looks past him to the far edge of the village, to the trees on the horizon, which seem to shiver in the smoke that rises up from the fires they’ve built. "I've seen some strange things myself, Bellamy." 

He follows her gaze, out to the pine trees and the vast, gray sky.  

"I believe it," he says. 

For a while, then, they're silent. With the dying of the light, the air has started to become uncomfortably chill, but he's not ready to go in yet, and Clarke is patient. 

Then: "I need to tell you something else," he says. He's looking out into the middle distance. He can feel her watching him. "The woman. I knew her. It was Octavia." 

"Octavia," Clarke repeats. "Does that mean—you _do_ think she's—" 

_Returning home?_

"I think Jasper was right," he says. Clarke squeezes his arm, and he puts his hand over her hand and hopes she understands the gesture, that he isn't going to break down, that he isn't going to cry. That he’s all right. "I don't think she's...one of us anymore." His eyes scan the spaces between the houses, the edges of the village, the trees—as if maybe he'll find her. As if maybe she's still out there, watching him. But he knows her job, for now, is done. 

He heard her warning. He even understands, though it leaves a bitter taste, that there was nothing he could have done. 

"Do you think you'll see her again?" Clarke asks. 

He nods. "I'm pretty sure I will. But hopefully not for a long time." 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! 
> 
> This story has an accompanying moodboard [on my tumblr](http://kinetic-elaboration.tumblr.com/post/179350282151/a-long-time-bellamy-octavia-bellarke-1800).


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